American letters: ‘Pen to Paper’ exhibition puts words to the artists’ work

BY TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY | REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

Howard Finster illustrates his penciled letter to Barbara Shisser with portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, William Henry Harrison, Andrew Jackson, William Shakespeare and Shissler herself. ContributedGeorgia O’Keeffe thanked a correspondent for the check slid under her door, but confessed she wasn’t satisfied with the painting she was working on. Contributed

In 1933, when collector Duncan Phillips suggested Arthur Dove might improve his painting “The Bessie of New York,” the modernist could barely contain his fury.

You can see it spewing out of his pencil in a hastily drafted letter now on view at the Florence Griswold Museum. The letter is a draft – Dove must have known he needed to tone it down a few notches or he might sever his relationship with the wealthy collector – but the second version is no less livid.

Phillips had – clumsily, it must be said – suggested Dove cut the painting in half.

“The Bessie” might not have been Dove’s best painting – its cartoonish eyes give it the mien of Lil’ Toot – yet Dove’s desperate financial straits did nothing to curb his ire. “Your letter is the most amazing sort of criticism that I have ever had,” Dove wrote. “When you take the privilege of sawing my picture in half it matters not much to me but I should think that you should think better than sawing a picture in half.

“I have come to the point of not caring whether you are interested in buying it or not because my love went into the picture and if you cut my love in half, that is the trouble.”

Phillips, needless to say, did not buy the painting. It now resides at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

“Pen to Paper: Artists’ Handwritten Letters from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art,” the museum’s current exhibit, is about many things. It is about the relationships forged between artists and collectors, like that of Dove and Phillips. It’s about the manner in which artists work out and elucidate the principles of their art to friends and fellow artists. But it is ultimately about how letters themselves are pieces of art – gorgeous testaments to a craft nearing obsolescence that evoke beauty, intimacy, surprise and delight.

Mary Savig, curator of manuscripts at the Archives of American Art, writes that handwritten letters are “performances on paper,” particularly in personal correspondence, where their “nuances evoke the presence of the author. Each message brims with the sensibility of the writer at the moment of the interplay among mind, hand and pen.”

And most of these letters are written with a fountain pen: the ballpoint was not introduced until the 1930s and not in widespread use until the 1950s.

That gives such letters more calligraphic expressiveness and individuality. Although standards of penmanship had been advanced by writing master Platt Rogers Spencer in the 19th century and educator A.N. Palmer in the 20th, most of these artists were as individualistic as their work. Letters here are articulated in bulbous, rounded verticals or elegantly tilting script.

Some, like that labored over by Joseph Cornell to Marcel Duchamp’s widow after Cornell heard of Duchamp’s death, are chilling. Cornell’s letter, written on lined paper with numerous cross-outs, includes the admission that he was so beset by emotional “turbulence” at the news that he was unable to leave the house until nearly a week later. A sense of ominousness inflects the newsy aerogram letter Jackson Pollack’s estranged wife Lee Krasner wrote Pollock from Paris. In the tiny corner at the end of the letter, Krasner writes in parentheses “How are you Jackson?” Within a week, Pollock was killed in a drunken car crash and Krasner returned to bury him.

Other letters, like the free-spirited note Winslow Homer wrote to Thomas B. Clarke in 1901, include little drawings and doodles. Folk artist and Baptist preacher Howard Finster liberally annotates his penciled letter to Barbara Shisser with portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, William Henry Harrison, Andrew Jackson, William Shakespeare and Shissler herself. Saul Steinberg’s “letter” is something of an epistolary trompe l’oeil; it looks like a letter – and a very official one on Smithsonian Institution stationary – but is actually decorative gibberish.

THE EXHIBIT EXPLORES the handwriting of celebrated artists such as Berenice Abbott, Alexander Calder, Mary Cassatt, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Eakins, Jackson Pollock, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler and many others. Where possible, the letters are displayed adjacent to works of art from these artists.

The museum has annotated the Smithsonian exhibit with its own selection of letters from the Lyme Art Colony, where letter writing was an important tool used by Florence Griswold and visiting artists to solidify travel plans.

Although many of the letters illuminate personality – look at Maxfield Parish’s precise, Cyrillic-looking script or Martin Johnson Head’s relaxed, elongated long-hand – some are contextually fascinating, even revelatory. Grandma Moses writes of her California friend bringing “chinchillays from thir (sic) ranch” to see how they would do in this climate: “they have did fine,” she reports. Marsden Hartley breathlessly reports his sighting of a “well set up” male bather who was “fresh and clean and glowing.”

Among the most revealing are two letters by Mary Cassatt – one written in 1905, before she stopped painting in 1914 due to eyesight problems -and one written in 1922 after the Carnegie Institute bought her painting “Young Women Picking Fruit” (1891).

In the first, written in response to a request to become a juror for the Carnegie Institute, Cassatt reiterates her objection to juried art shows. “I could never reconcile it to my conscience to be the means of shutting the door in the face of a fellow painter,” she writes. Most of the original impressionists, she writes “would never have had a chance in the official Salon.” They were, famously, part of the Salons des Refusés.

The second is a peculiar message of gratitude to the Carnegie Institute at the purchase of her work. In it, she seems to try to conceal her frustration at how long it took the Carnegie to acquire the work by a woman artist.

“If it has stood the test of time & is well drawn its place in a Museum might show the present generation that we worked & learnt our profession,” she wrote.

In a 1988 oral history interview for the Archives of American Art, painter Paul Cadmus lamented “There should be more letter writing than there is.” Cadmus blamed Americans’ poor handwriting. He could not have anticipated a day when many Americans express tenderness through texts or tweets.

What: Pen to Paper: Artists’ Handwritten Letters from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art